Servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior in the hospitality industry: The mediating role of work engagement

The study aims to assess the impact of servant leadership on the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of frontline hotel employees, with work engagement as a mediating role. We use a qualitative research method to evaluate the appropriateness of the scale. Next, the hypotheses were tested by quantitative research with a sample size of 469, collected using the snowball and quota sampling methods. The results show that: (1) servant leadership directly influences all three dimensions of OCB; (2) work engagement directly affects OCB toward organizations and OCB toward customers, and also partially mediates the relationship between servant leadership and OCB toward organizations, OCB toward customers; (3) work engagement neither directly impacts OCB toward individual nor mediates the relationship between servant leadership and OCB toward individual. The research findings provide theoretical and practical contributions to enhancing the understanding of the formation mechanism of OCB among frontline hotel employees.